Kiss Me and I'll Save Your Life
by epichlexi
Summary: She kissed him in Rome, they had a deal. Four years later, she kissed him again, and then she saved his life.
1. Prologue

Kiss Me And I'll Save Your Life

**AN: I don't own the characters, though I wish those who did would find their brains and bring us a season five with lots of Teslen… Mild spoilers if you haven't seen the deleted scenes from Sanctuary For None. Major spoilers if you haven't actually seen Sanctuary for None… ;) This chapter is heavily SFN recap to set the mood. It's mostly a prologue to the story itself. **

**Summary:** He'd made her a deal, and he'd saved her in Rome. He'd nearly sacrificed himself for her in Columbia. Now she was ready to sacrifice all for all; but not before she kissed him and saved his life.

Helen half-ran, half-limped into the main lab of the Old City Sanctuary. She, Henry and Nikola had been keeping Caleb and his minions at bay and trying to lead them into the main lab, shutting off access to other wards of the mansion. Despite Henry's assertion that this was "of all the very bad ideas," he had obeyed her request and helped guide them in this direction.

Now, she saw neither Henry nor Caleb, and as she entered the lab Nikola turned from looking over the array on the table. "Helen!"

"I'm fine," she started as she moved toward him. "Are they coming?"

"I noticed all the residents are gone," Nikola started to question. Damn him. Damn Nikola and his complete inability to focus! She waved her arm a bit to get his attention, "Caleb! Is he close?"

"He's on his way; he's not alone." Helen nodded, "Where's Henry?" "He's securing the last sector."

She nodded. Everything was weighing down on her about what she was about to do. "Go, Nikola…" She leaned in, a hand coming to his arm as she pressed a brief but firm kiss to his lips. "Go, quickly."

The look they exchanged said it all. He nodded, knowing she had something up her sleeve. He hoped whatever it was would protect her the way he truly believed she believed it would.

He turned and took a few long strides to the door, turning to use the tablet to hit the switch to close it. He stood there until it was closed, never letting his eyes move from hers. This might be the last time he would ever see her, and he wanted to make it count. He hoped she could see in his eyes what his lips could not say.

Helen watched with hopeful but pained eyes as the door shut and left her alone in the lab. She hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to Henry, and now Nikola was out of her sight. The HAP was like a son to her, and the vampire… Good Lord, what could she say about Nikola? He was the last. The last with her, of The Five. Nigel had been dead for over 50 years, James for three. John had been last known to be in an area that had exploded and had never been heard from since. He was believed to be dead. Even her father, while not one of The Five, had gained his own longevity from the Source Blood after they had… and they had no evidence he had survived the destruction of Praxis. And now even Bigfoot. Her heart had broken finding his body in the front pathway, but Caleb and his goons had interrupted her before she could respond fully.

She didn't have but a split second to process these fleeting thoughts before Caleb and his followers came walking through the other door. "You seem mentally unstable, facing us alone." So Caleb had seen her send Nikola away.

"I'm a chronic micromanager," she replied, hitting several controls to fire from the lasers at Caleb's crew. They fell, but Caleb was on her before she could shoot him down as well, punching her with his abnormal superhuman strength. She flew across the table, scattering beakers and components everywhere and falling with a thud onto the hard floor.

Caleb began crossing the room toward her. "It's a shame Helen, we could have been friends. Standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the dawn of a new age. It's too bad, you're gonna miss all the fun." Caleb stood over her with a sly smirk.

"So will you," Helen replied, a nod indicating the computer countdown to Self Destruct in 44 seconds. Caleb's eyes widened and he turned to her, "Make it stop!"

"My house, my rules." She tapped another control on the tablet and a large drilling device came down and impaled Caleb.

Once Caleb's body hung lifeless from the device, Helen got to her feet and hurried over to the tech shield jacket Henry had been working so hard on. He had only had time and resources to make one, and thankfully with Nikola leaving when she told him to, there was only need of one. She pulled it on as quickly as possible, the timer was down to six seconds.

"Dear God…" Helen said in a startled voice as the enormity of what she was about to do hit her at the literal last second.

Perhaps none of them had fully figured it out. She had been secretive for 113 years, after all. But now Will was working for Addison and SCIU, and had taken Kate and Abby on some sort of hail-Mary attempt to get the abnormal from the Homeland District out of harm's way before the "death nodes" could fry them. His guilt over designing the thing had been eating at him all day.

"That's not what it was meant for!" Nikola had shouted at Henry upon his realization that they could be modified to become death weapons rather than simple containment devices. An ultimate invisible dog fence.

Henry had been distracted working on that tech shield jacket. It was pointless and would never work, he had started to tell him. But when his frustration and depression over the whole SCIU situation had driven him to find a way to alter the wine so that for the first time in his vampiric life, he could get drunk, he had finally shifted his focus and curiosity after the fact to whatever Helen had been working on.

He'd entered her office and waited for her to return. He took a seat nonchalantly at her desk as he heard her walking down the hall, finishing a phone call. She'd questioned him about why he wasn't working, and he said he was finding it hard to work with the distractions. Her lies. After they went back and forth a little he had grown impatient.

"You can hide it from the kids, Helen, but from me? I know you too well, Mrs. Robinson."

"Go back to work, Nikola!"

"I will, once you tell me what's going on." He flashed her that charmer's grin.

Helen kept her cool. She had an excellent poker face. "I've no idea what you're blathering on about."

"Yeah I've been trying to figure it out. Ever since I sobered up. And it all seems to come back to New York, 1901. The same year that fascist J.P. Morgan ran me off Long Island…" Nikola started, but Helen couldn't contain her amusement anymore. Ducking her face for a few seconds to hide her grin, she composed herself and answered him in a matter-of-fact tone: "You took him for three million dollars and built a radio tower to talk to aliens!"

"Which worked, thank you!" Nikola snapped back, but turned to approach her again. "But my point is, when you came to me, asking about the controlled use of nitroglycerin, our target was a Peruvian underwater cave. I thought I was helping you capture some useless multi-headed shark."

"And?" Helen played clueless. "And you lied to me. According to the Praxian database, that cave leads to an arterial passageway to Hollow Earth."

"That's impossible. We only discovered Hollow Earth last year."

"The rest of us, yes. But you've known about it for 113 years. So I want to know if the Helen Magnus who wined and dined me at the Hotel Mira-Florez in 1902 was you, or the other you?"

Helen smiled and reached up to pat his cheek fondly. "Ah, Nikola. You're the genius. You figure it out." And she had gotten up and left the room.

Now, Nikola was leaving the main lab. As he turned away finally when the door shut, Henry was standing there. He had just enough time to grab the HAP by the arm and turn him to follow him out the next door. Once it was secured, they managed to turn and take a few steps before the explosions began to rock the building.

It was over in seconds. A series of explosions had gone off and Henry and Nikola were left at the gate, watching in horror was the building crumbled down. Henry's home, Nikola's refuge.

Will, Kate and Abby stood and watched as the flames erupted down the road. "Kate, get these people off the streets, find a safe house." Will knew there was no time to waste, tragedy or not.

"On it," Kate stated through teary eyes.

"Will, I'm sure Magnus…" Abby started, but Will shook his head, eyes never leaving the flames. "No, she's not."

And still inside the building was the one woman who meant so much to them all.


	2. Dust Settles

Helen crawled and climbed her way through the debris, rubble falling all around her as the flames and smoke smoldered on hours after the initial explosion. It was dark out. Emergency vehicles were beginning to dissipate; the medical ones, anyway. Firefighters were still working to contain the flames, though they had died down considerably. The Sanctuary was sectioned off on its own enough that with the mild weather and lack of winds, there was currently no real concern for neighboring buildings.

Climbing up over the remains of what had been an outer wall, Helen winced at the feeling of several bruised ribs. She had no doubt this was the fallout of Caleb throwing her across the desk. Actually, across the desk in the lab and across her office. Henry's FOSSS tech shield had worked brilliantly; she had no real injuries to speak of from the explosions. "Well done, Henry!" she uttered to herself, her sweet, geeky HAP "son" nowhere in sight.

Will would have taken them somewhere by now. Will, Henry, Kate, and possibly Nikola would be in some hotel somewhere in Old City while things played out. They must surely all believe she was dead. It broke her heart to know she had caused them all such pain. But she couldn't endanger everything the past century and more had led up to. They would all know the truth in due time. She couldn't blow the cover for now that Helen Magnus was dead. She had gone down with the ship. Old City needed to believe that. SCIU needed to believe that. The entire world, in reality, needed to believe that.

But the truth was that Helen Magnus was very much alive, and she had a lot of work to do.

xxxxxxxxx

They'd arranged for four rooms in a local hotel. One for Kate, one for Henry, one for Nikola and one for Will and Abby. But hours after they had checked in, they were all huddled in Nikola's room discussing the events of the evening.

He wished they would leave. Just leave him alone. This was why they were in his room and not Will's. They knew he wouldn't follow to join them there, and they probably didn't want to leave him alone. They were all going through hell, but right about now he just wanted to have privacy to deal with his.

A silence fell over the room gradually as everyone realized there was nothing more to say. Magnus was gone. Will was sitting in the chair in the corner, Abby squeezed in with him, her arms around him. Kate was leaning back against the kitchen counter, staring at the floor and kicking the toe of her boot against the tiles. Henry was standing by the window, looking out at the Old City night. Hands in his pockets, the young HAP had a distant, heartbroken look on his face, and Nikola was sure he was the one he could most closely relate to right now. Henry had effectively lost both mother and father tonight; Helen and Bigfoot had raised him in the Sanctuary since he was only three years old.

Well, if he couldn't be rid of all of them, maybe they would at least give him and Henry some space. He crossed the room to lean in over Will's chair from behind and spoke in a hushed voice, "Maybe you could give Henry and I a little time…"

Will's eyes lit slightly with understanding and he nodded. Henry was too boxed up inside, more so than the rest of them. "Sure. Kate, come on; we should get in touch with Declan and the other heads." He sighed and moved his arm from Abby's back so she could stand, then he did and they headed off to leave Nikola's suite.

Nikola waited until the door shut behind Kate, and crossed the room to stand by the floor-length windows next to Henry. He and the HAP had come to more friendly terms in the past few months, ever since Nikola had crossed the rift field to save the younger man from the oogly-googly alien squid creature that had been terrorizing his staff at the SCIU facility.

"Speak, Heinrich," Nikola started with his usual tone, hoping some semblance of normalcy would help them both cope with the moment. The lycan shot him a look and then returned to staring out the window. Nikola sighed. People skills were never really his thing.

"Henry." He tried again in a gentler tone. Henry's shoulders slumped a little as he tried to let go of some of the pent up tension and stress that had built in him since they left the lab to "guide" Caleb and his cronies to the main lab of the Sanctuary.

"I keep thinking this is all a bad dream and soon we're all just gonna wake up… some sort of telepathic nightmare from the Crixorum or … Sally or … something." Henry's voice was a bit ragged as he admitted his thoughts. His eyes fixed on the night skyline.

"It's not. This was something Magnus had been planning, more or less, for over a century…" Nikola started in a calm tone, but Henry turned sharply, casting his hazel eyes toward the taller man's gaze. "No. No don't give me that 'more than a century' spiel! Nikola, Magnus walked through a rift field with Adam Worth a few months ago and now everything's changed! Now Magnus is dead!"

"She sacrificed herself for the good of the Sanctuary, Henry. For the good of us all!"

Henry shook his head and stared at Nikola with heartfelt agony. "Then why the hell did she feel she had to go down with the ship? The Sanctuary isn't some house… But it _is_ Magnus."

Nikola nodded. He couldn't think of anything to say, for once the vampire was at a loss for words. He felt exactly the same way Henry did, and he couldn't quite find the strength to say it.

A world without Helen Magnus was not one he cared to be in.

xxxxxxxxx

Dark had fallen and Helen felt it was now safe to make her way to her destination. She was still sore as anything, but she had no time to waste. A few supplies stashed away before the explosion had proven useful: an energy bar, a few prescription-level painkillers and some bottled water had been her dinner. She could only hope her team had fared better. If they had eaten at all. She longed to reach out to them, her family, and let them know she was alive.

By now they all surely believed otherwise. Will would be spinning his wheels on what to do next, probably getting an earful of semi-unsolicited advice from Declan and any other heads of house who had brought themselves into the loop after word reached them of her untimely demise. Abby, most out of the loop of all and not an official part of the Sanctuary team, would try to be supportive and caring, but Helen knew Will – he would probably shut out her attempts.

Kate… Kate would be in shock. About the explosions, about her apparent death, everything. She probably knew about Bigfoot as well. She'd hole herself away and stare at the floor until she was ready to go try to draw someone else out… Henry or Will, whoever she felt needed it more.

Henry. Her heart broke for Henry, thinking of the boy who she had raised from the age of three. Her son in every sense except by blood. He'd be feeling very alone tonight, and probably full of hurt, fear, and anger. She felt the familiar pull in her heart as she felt a couple of decades ago, when a frightened Ashley or Henry would crawl into her bed in the night, frightened by some nightmare or shadow on the wall. For children growing up in the house where the monsters truly resided, this was not an uncommon occurrence. She wanted to go to him now, to hug him, ruffle his messy hair and tell him in her reassuring mother tone that everything would be all right. But she couldn't. She had to be dead tonight. The most important part of a faked death was not letting yourself be spotted anytime soon. It had been sixty-nine years since the last time she'd had to be so closely involved with a faked death …

Nikola. Oh, Nikola. Where was he tonight? Had he stayed with the others? Had he wandered off on his own to some other place to lick his wounds? Was he drowning himself in wine that couldn't effect him anyway? Helen knew Nikola better than anyone else, and he, her if she was honest. That's what came of being friends over the course of two lifetimes. Nikola was hurting, and he'd never let on. He'd wallow, perhaps for a long time, and then he'd set off on some madness… some breakdown-driven plot toward world domination, or destroying SCIU, or some other such idiocy. Just like in Rome.

"Kiss me and I'll save your life," he had told her. Now tonight, she had kissed him and saved his life.

"Oh, Nikola," Helen whispered as she closed the door to the tunnel leading down to the entranceway to the new Sanctuary, "… don't do anything too foolish. I'll be back for you soon."


End file.
